Sun Wbserver 7 Abhay Dabholkar

Sun Network Cache and Accelerator was first introduced in the Solaris 8 operating Environment. NCA provides increased server capacity and a web server can process more user requests per second. It really works great for static pages.

I ran a sample test on a static page. With SNCA I got significant performance improvements [almost 50%]

How to configure SNCA on Solaris OS? Thanks Morris Hooten for helping me with it.

If you are on solaris 10 make sure you are in Global Zone.

For each interface, there must be an accompanying hostname.interface-name file and an
entry in /etc/hosts file for the contents of hostname.interface-name. To bring up the Solaris
NCA feature on all interfaces, place an asterisk (*) in the nca.if file.

1. Enable the ncakmod kernel module
Change the status entry in /etc/nca/ncakmod.conf to enabled.
# cat /etc/nca/ncakmod.conf
# NCA Kernel Module Configuration File
status=enabled
httpd_door_path=/var/run/nca_httpd_1.door
ncad_status=disabled
nca_active=disabled

2. Enable NCA logging
Change the status entry in /etc/nca/ncalogd.conf to enabled.
# cat /etc/nca/ncalogd.conf
# NCA Logging Configuration File
status=enabled
logd_path_name="/var/nca/log"
logd_file_size=1000000

To Enable SNCA to Work With Web Server

Using Admin Console

1. From the Common Tasks page, choose a configuration and click Edit Configuration.
2. Click the HTTP Listeners tab and select the HTTP listener to edit.


3. On the Edit HTTP Listener page, set the Protocol Family to nca.The HTTP listener must be listening on port 80 for this to work.


4. Save your changes.


5. Click the Performance tab.


6. Click the Cache sub tab.


7. On the Cache Settings page, make sure the file cache is enabled and enable Use Sendfile.


8. Save your changes.


9. Redeploy the configuration for your changes to take effect.

Maximum Threads and Queue Size

When configuring Web Server to be used with SNCA, disable the thread pool provides better performance. These settings are on the configuration's Performance tab - HTTP sub tab, under Thread Pool Settings.

Note:
Web server access log will not show any entry for cached resourses. It will be available in SNCA log files.

Resources
SNCA White Paper